


A Forgotten Hill

by brasspetal



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: After Season 2 but before Season 3, Agoraphobia, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Depression, F/M, Loneliness, Self Loathing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-07 22:34:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11068491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brasspetal/pseuds/brasspetal
Summary: She maps out the improbabilities of the extinct.





	A Forgotten Hill

The moon cracked the sky open like the spine of a book.

Vanessa set her finger to the frosted glass. She draws herself in the condensation. _The scorpion._ Its tail whipping upwards over the top of London itself. She maps out the improbabilities of the extinct.

The city was just starting to wake up and she was alone. She was more alone in the daylight, where she could pinpoint the imperfections in the glass. She could tell you every _single_ one.

She hadn’t changed out of her bedclothes for several pitiable nights but she couldn’t be bothered to care. The rage, the violence within her had quieted. She had never thought she’d miss it.

Silence can be destructive, however. She could draw and carve a thousand scorpions, crisscrossing over her heart and it wouldn’t change a thing. She had no control over time. She imagined when she was a girl, staring at the grandfather clock in the hall until it began to spin backwards into eternity. Her existence would be voided.

She was a wretched thing. A forgotten thing. She wondered if even in time Mr. Chandler would forget her too.

His letter was a cruel kindness. He despised himself just enough to leave forever. Could she find fault in that kind of loathing? No. She imagined a time before she loitered in this bedroom as if it was his forgotten hill. Maybe it was.

She could sometimes hear the creaking of shoes downstairs. Malcolm would stare, transfixed by his wrinkled maps.

_‘I was never going to go to Africa’_

It hurt her heart that they were both trapped here and one day, he too would be gone.

She wants to press her bare feet to the wood and force herself to bed but she can’t move from the window. She would become a statue, waiting, and watching London come to life. She would watch it change and recreate itself anew, while she remained.

The outlier doesn’t get to find happiness in normalcy. The outlier watches others live their small happy lives around her, _while she remained._

She practiced mimicking their smiles in the mirror. It never looked quite right on her face. Those women who danced and courted, who smiled as pretty as a daffodil. She would never be able to smile so freely and she envied that most of all. They didn’t know the nebulous dark like she did. They never would have to be a statue on _his_ forgotten hill.

Her fate was untrammeled in the fog. She ghosted her breath on the glass and drew yet another fleeting scorpion.  It slowly evaporates from her sight.

She sees the figure then, like a dark smudge standing alone on the street. She thinks for a moment that she was imagining it and her madness had finally taken root. The more she sat there staring, the more real he became. He was looking up at her window, an act which no one ever bothered to attempt. She thinks maybe it was his ghost; the one she created. It didn't much matter. That smudge was what kept her from retreating back into the darkness of this room. Soon, he would evaporate like her scorpions always did. There would be nothing there but an empty street.

He started to move then and her breath became confined. He was walking to her front door. _He was here_. He wasn’t just a smudge or a specter; haunting the space between morning and night.

She heard the muffled knocking resound from downstairs and that’s when she finally wept. Everything tumbled outward, all the wishes she held like prisoners within her.  


End file.
